We Are a Nation Led by Monsters

Even for an already vindictive and hateful administration, this has been a particularly cruel summer.

To date, some 2,000 children, at least 100 of them under the age of 4, have been separated from their parents and detained at the border, some shuffled off to temporary foster families, others kept in warehouse-like facilities. There, they are stuck in cages — or, as Breitbart called it in a particularly Orwellian redefinition, “chain-link partitions.” After CBS aired a segment on the child detentions, Border Patrol reached out to the network to say they were “very uncomfortable” with the term cages, leaving us all debating semantics while children remain locked in a metal structure like zoo animals, lying on gym mats with foil emergency blankets for warmth.

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In a particularly sick twist, employees in the facilities housing children have reportedly been told not to hold or touch the children in their care. Consider how deeply inhuman and contrary to our most primal impulses it is to not comfort a child — especially one who has just been ripped away from her parents.

This administration seems to consider a great many people to be subhuman.

And consider how deeply cruel this is to children, and how it runs contrary to everything we know about child development. Kids need strong attachments in order to feel secure; breaking those attachments can lead to lifelong psychological challenges. Children need touch, affection, comfort, and regular, varied mental stimulation. Without all of that, children experience cognitive and emotional delays, which can affect them for their entire lives. The damage done when you sever a deep parental bond at an early age is lasting and severe. When Romania warehoused children in state-run orphanages, the results were disastrous, even for the children who were adopted at a young age and raised in loving families. When you interrupt a child’s most intense attachment—typically with their parents—and place them in a facility where they are emotionally neglected, you don’t just steal their sense of safety; you may curtail their ability to thrive into adulthood.

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According to one civil rights lawyer, a Honduran woman even had her breastfeeding baby taken from her. What have we become when we are taking the smallest of children away from mothers who simply sought a better life — and who we now deem criminals? (The Department of Homeland Security has called the account of the civil rights leader “false.” The department also denied that there was a policy of separating children from parents at the border, then changed course and defended the policy.)

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It’s not clear when or how these children will be reunited with their parents. Already, some parents have been deported — without their kids. Elsa Johana Ortiz Enriquez was just sent back to Guatemala without her 8-year-old boy.

The administration ordered this policy of tearing children from their parents’ arms, but they’re lying about it, blaming it on Democrats and partisan gridlock. For months, observers have wondered why Attorney General Jeff Sessions has stayed in his role, despite repeat public humiliations by his boss. This is why: He relishes abusive anti-immigrant policies designed to inflict the most suffering on other people. In one of this administration’s most disgustingly craven attempts at political hardball, Sessions is even using children taken from their parents as political pawns—but Trump’s long-promised wall, he says,and family separations will be rendered unnecessary. That he also gets to undermine Obama-era efforts to expand voting rights and battle racism, shifting his focus instead to making voting (and life generally) harder for people of color, is icing on the cake.

Separating children from parents at the border has, rightly, been the Trump immigration policy that has drawn the widest condemnation–the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics called it “government-sanctioned child abuse.” But it’s hardly the only cruelty this president and his band of punitive, small-minded cronies have inflicted. While the administration has blamed immigrants for the family separations, saying legitimate claims for asylum can be made at a formal port of entry and the parents whose kids are taken away are law-breakers, they’ve also been refusing asylum-seekers. Some of those ports of entry aren’t allowing people to claim asylum, sending them back home or telling them to try again later — not an easy task when you’re fleeing for your life. Other asylum-seekers are given little more than a rubber-stamp hearing before being deported back to countries we know are run by cruel, despotic regimes, where they face potential imprisonment, torture, or even death. In other words, the Trump administration claim that detained immigrants are law-breakers who should follow established legal paths to claim asylum neglects was to mention that the same administration is systematically cutting those legal paths off. One Eritrean man, who was refused asylum and deported from the United States, killed himself in the Cairo airport this month rather than return to a country where he likely faced a horrific future.

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It’s simple cruelty—that’s not just the outcome, it’s the entire point.

The Trump administration has also been deporting people who have lived in the United States for nearly their entire lives. Manuel Antonio Cano Pacheco’s mother brought him to the United States when he was just 3, seeking what all parents want for their children: safety and opportunity. Despite only knowing life in Iowa, Manuel, just a teenager, was deported back to Mexico. Weeks later he was killed.

The cruelties of this administration are extending to domestic violence victims, too — under a new order from Sessions, they can no longer claim asylum. Neither can victims of gang violence, despite the fact that Mexico and several Central American nations have proven unable or unwilling to protect their own citizens from this often deadly scourge. Trump himself regularly cites the transnational gang MS-13 as a vicious threat, calling them “animals” and saying the danger they pose justifies our increasingly strict immigration rules. And yet people fleeing this same gang now lack justification to claim asylum.

Asylum is meant to protect individuals who have been persecuted because of their membership in a particular group, or have a well-founded fear of persecution. Women who are beaten, raped, and tortured by their partners (or by gang members—sometimes one and the same), and who are ignored by their country’s law enforcement because domestic violence is considered a private matter, are indeed members of a persecuted group who the state has declined to protect. Sessions has taken the same view as abusive men and ambivalent leaders: violence is less of a state problem when it’s leveled against women, and gender-based violence is a private matter beyond the purview of law enforcement. “The asylum statute does not provide redress for all misfortune,” he said.

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Trump’s rhetoric has always been bigoted, hateful, and racist, from referring to African nations as “shithole countries,” suggesting immigrants are rapists and animals, and attacking an Indiana-born judge as lacking impartiality because of his Mexican heritage. Now, his policies are accelerating to match. The ban on refugees from some majority-Muslim countries was a shock early in his tenure, but the backlash doesn’t seem to have chastened the president. Instead, he has an enthusiastic team behind him—most notably Sessions, whose 1986 nomination to a federal judgeship was rejected due to his comments on race, and the virulently anti-immigrant aide Stephen Miller, who heartlessly called the administration’s zero-tolerance policy a “simple decision.” The fundamental underpinning of all of it is the view that brown and black people are simply not like “us,” and as such, don’t deserve even the most basic humane treatment.

This administration seems to consider a great many people to be subhuman. They seem unable or unwilling to put themselves in the shoes of the many immigrants who come to our nation. One has to ask: what would you do if you had the bad luck to be born in a violence-stricken area, where you can’t count on the police to protect you, and staying means signing your children up for a bleak future — if they have a future at all? What would you do if your country descended into war, and you were left with nothing, and no guarantee that you could stay and keep yourself and your babies safe? Who among us wouldn’t seek safe harbor?

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There remains much to debate about what a humane, sane, and reasonable immigration policy looks like, and well-meaning, empathetic people can certainly debate around the edges. But there is no humane, well-meaning, or even logical justification for separating children from their parents and refusing to give asylum-seekers a fair hearing. It’s simple cruelty—that’s not just the outcome, it’s the entire point. The administration has said as much: They have a “zero tolerance” approach to immigration, and are ripping toddlers from their parents’ arms to send a message to other would-be immigrants that it’s not worth it to come to the United States, because we are so punitive and cruel to immigrants that we would take their babies away.

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In the age of Trump, our country has become cruel beyond measure. It’s a national disgrace, and in a more just world, this president and every single person who works for him would find themselves professionally and socially shunned, shameful and evil as they are. Instead, they will almost surely push forward, coming up with new and creative ways to hurt other human beings, and lying all the way.

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